Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/226

212 impossible, but to better existing conditions to the extent that betterment may be possible.

The steps that followed the defeat of the administration bill are well known. There have been additional issues of bonds which may serve as the basis for additional bank-note circulation under present laws. A better system will doubtless be adopted in time, but enlightenment as to the ultimate basis of representatives of value, and their use in forwarding civilization by effecting the exchange of human effort, will need to spread in great waves to the minds of many people before there is the adoption of an ideal monetary system, and before such a system will diminish the need for money changers by effecting exchanges of effort without their aid.

And it should be perceived that the adoption of a monetary system consisting of paper representatives of value, based upon the result of human effort, will be an important step toward the determination of an absolute standard or measure of value. The attempts to invest gold or silver, or both, with the attributes of such a standard are the underlying causes of a current phase of the monetary problem that is uppermost in discussion. To the word "bimetallism" many different meanings have been attached. But, as even the most pronounced advocates of the gold standard do not oppose the use of silver for subsidiary currency, the question evidently has not now to do with the abolishment of silver as money; and as the most pronounced advocates of silver at present, in demanding even the unlimited coinage of that metal, insist that its value always bears a definite and fixed ratio to the value of gold, the question evidently has not now to do with the maintenance of a double standard of value, for if the ratio between the metals can be constant, there necessarily is but a single standard. That neither silver nor gold throughout the past has afforded an absolute standard of value is abundantly shown by the frequent fluctuations in the value of these metals, both as compared one with the other and either with other commodities.

The ratio between the value of silver and gold that was fairly level from the beginning of the expansion of mediæval commerce to the middle of the sixteenth century, was violently disturbed by the great yield of the silver mines of Potosi. The instability increased with the variations in the supply of silver as mines were opened in Mexico, and in the supply of gold as that metal was found in Brazil. The disturbance became feverish with the discovery of gold in California, and the oscillations in the ratio have since that time not ceased, having been affected by the output of silver from the Western States, and apprehension is now being felt as to the effect of the development of new gold fields in Colorado, Siberia, South America, and Africa.